


what you deserve

by youcouldmakealife



Series: duelling banjos [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 03:37:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12999021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youcouldmakealife/pseuds/youcouldmakealife
Summary: He’s the most beautiful person Julien has ever seen. Breathtaking.Stories that start like that, there’s no way for them to end in anything but tragedy.





	what you deserve

**Author's Note:**

> For Ana. And for everyone else who willing kept on cutting themselves on the shards of Jules and Alyosha’s story in the four years since I first posted Julien’s Adventures in Affliction. You guys kept them always in the back of my mind, patiently waiting for their story to be done justice. I hope I can.
> 
> And like, warning that I'm sure is unnecessary for anyone who has read the preceding parts: "Stories that start like that, there’s no way for them to end in anything but tragedy." is 100% meant. The first parts showed you the ending. I wanted to show you all the moments before it.

He’s the most beautiful person Julien has ever seen. Breathtaking. 

Stories that start like that, there’s no way for them to end in anything but tragedy.

*

He doesn’t speak very much English.

Julien doesn’t know who he’s referring to there. Neither of them do. Julien had English classes in school, but he’d never been very good at them. At school in general, mind drifting during classes, eyes fixed on the snow drifts outside. Twenty-five minutes to walk from school to the pond that he lived on during the winter. Five minutes to walk to the outdoor rink. The ice there was smoother, less rutted, but busy, hectic with kids learning to skate with a chair in front of their sliding feet, parents coaxing, girls with their arms tucked into the crook of their boyfriend’s arm, or clutching at each other with mittened fingers. 

You couldn’t play hockey on it except for designated periods for shinny, and then it wasn’t really hockey, ages ranging from eight to eighteen, everyone trading off sticks for shifts, shouting from the sidelines and waiting for their turn.

It was easier on the pond. Quiet. You could hear yourself think, if you needed to. Not that Julien did, not on the pond, not with a stick in his hands. His mind went quiet too. It was the only way he knew to quiet it, back then.

*

Konstantinovich doesn’t speak very much English. He speaks French, a little. Enough for the basics, enough to be understood, at least by Julien, though it sounds artificial, the kind of French that’s never left a classroom, the kind of French that never left Paris. Or it did, Julien supposes. Made it to Moscow, then to Vancouver.

They laud Konstantinovich’s French. “You only took three years?” they ask, incredulous, those few that speak it, men from Québec, Montréal, Sherbrooke. Places closer to Ontario, to the United States, than they are to Gaspé. Their French doesn’t sound the same as Alexei’s, not as artificial, but artificial all the same. They look at Julien like they pity him when he opens his mouth, fractured, pitiful English, fluent, rapidfire French. Their expression is the same for either.

“I’m sorry,” they say to Julien. “No idea what you’re saying.”

*

They don’t say much about Julien before the season starts. He looks for his name, skimming through article after article in English, not taking it in, simply searching for the ‘Perreault’. He catches it a few times, often with the word ‘potential’. His eyes keep stuttering over ‘Konstantinovich’, liberally littered through the tiny print.

It took less than a single day of training camp for Julien to see that Konstantinovich was phenomenal. That’s to be expected, of course: not one of them, from the star players to the brute force, are any less than the very plateau of potential. And Julien heard the stories of his time in the Soviet League, the record-breaking rookie season. If Julien is potential, Konstantinovich is proven results. 

The NHL is a whole other level, the media says repeatedly, but it’s impossible not to read the hope between every line, even as poor as Julien’s English is. Impossible not to envy him for it, the way every eye is already on him, expectant. Impossible not to pity him for it either.

*

The pity doesn’t last. Alexei Konstantinovich is not the sort of man you pity. He’s not the sort of man who allows you to pity him. 

Alexei Konstantinovich is the sort of man who seeks Julien out, speaks to him in that perfect, polished French. His accent is impeccable. Grammar impeccable. Vocabulary small but precise. If Julien says a word he doesn’t know, he asks what it means, repeats it to Julien in a sentence, in context, testing it, and Julien has no doubt he knows it now, will never forget it. 

Unsurprisingly, his English quickly outstrips Julien’s, schooling or no.

Much more surprisingly, his hockey doesn’t.

*

If Konstantinovich is a foregone conclusion, Julien is a revelation.

He’s not bragging. That’s the word they use. A word he’s never heard outside the context of the church. 

He believes it’s meant to be a compliment. 

*

Julien’s learning Russian slowly. Alexei teaches him all the swear words first, of course. Then the most relevant: Julien points at a stick, and Alexei supplies him with the translation. Puck. Helmet. Once he’s got a handle, it expands. Door. Sky. Car, which is the same as in English, in French. Some words are universal, or perhaps just borrowed.

Their teammates are laughing at them. Alexei doesn’t seem to notice. Julien pretends not to. 

He learns English in bursts. One week his eyes will slide over a sign as they drive past it too fast for him to parse them, a blur of letters he recognises in an order he doesn’t. A week later they become words. Meaning.

*

Everything is too much. Everything is too loud, too busy, too hectic. Julien’s never lived alone before. He doesn’t even now, billets with an older teammate. His wife is from Rimouski. “Close to you,” his teammate said, which isn’t quite true. He shares a room on the road with Alexei. He doesn’t live alone, but after the crush of home, someone always yelling, someone always asking him for something, it’s very quiet. The quiet leaves him too much in his head.

The ice is still the ice. His mind empties. Maybe one day he’ll find some other place that feels like home, but he doubts it.

*

They start applying the word phenomenal to Julien as well. 

Other words used to describe them, the line they play together, the goals and assists and win after win after win:

Franchise saving. Unprecedented. Exciting. Prodigies. Unstoppable. Telepathic. Breathtaking. Calder incarnate.

Julien doesn’t know what some of them mean. Alexei tells him, English predictably outpacing Julien’s, and when he doesn’t know either, he’ll ask for him.

*

They don’t win the Cup. 

Being reminded the Canucks weren’t expected to make the playoffs before the season’s onset is not a consolation. Being informed they’re the reason the Canucks made it so far is the opposite of consolation. 

Julien says nothing about it to anyone but Alexei. He knows how it’d sound. Ungrateful. Petulant. There’s nothing worse than a sore loser.

Alexei quietly agrees with him. Julien knew he would.

*

Alexei leaves for Russia when the season ends. For home. Julien should make the trip himself, return home, but the NHL Awards are so soon, and it’s so far. Two flights to Québec. A day on the train to Gaspé. Then, weeks later, the same train, a flight from Québec to Toronto. Turning around and doing it all over again. It sounds exhausting. He’s already so tired.

Julien stays in Vancouver. Finds himself an apartment, one for just himself. Waits for it not to feel empty. Waits for Alexei to return.

*

Alexei wins the Calder, and Julien is so happy he can barely stand it.

“You should have won,” Alexei says that night, not once, or twice, but repeatedly, until Julien wants to put a hand over his mouth, make him quiet, or, perhaps, just let Alexei mouth the words against his palm so he can feel them as well as hear them. “You should have won.”

“You deserved it,” Julien says, and he means it, he means it every time. He doesn’t care that he’s lost. He would, presumably, if it was to someone else, but losing to Alexei doesn’t feel like losing. He tries to say that, but it never comes out right. Instead he’s as much of a broken record, the two of them absurd. It’s one of the best nights of his life.

“You should have won,” Alexei says, very late. He’s lost his tie at some point. His shirt’s unbuttoned enough that Julien can see the delicate chain around his throat, the gleam of gold. He wants to twist it through his fingers.

He’s had too much to drink, he thinks. They both have. 

‘I love you’, Julien thinks, and has the strangest feeling that it isn’t the first time he’s thought it. The words sit in his mouth, somewhere between sour and sweet. 

He swallows.

“You deserved it,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> Had to do a lot of background research, location wise, so if something seems weird to you (NHL Awards in Toronto, being able to take a train from Quebec City to Gaspe even though that route is not currently available, etc), that is the result of me delving in.


End file.
